But those are things I was never meant to know.
Trigger 17 is someone I was never meant to know, and we should not be here. Especially considering that he’s had no chance to hack into any system to buy us time.
“I have to be showered and back at my desk in twenty minutes.” Yet I can hear the reluctance in my own voice.
He takes another step toward me. “How fast can you shower?” His voice is suddenly deep and gravelly, and the question sends an unexpected bolt of anticipation through me that settles low in my stomach.
“I…” My whole body seems to be tingling, and I don’t know why.
“I haven’t stopped thinking about you,” he whispers, and I am relieved to realize I’m not the only one haunted by our stolen time in the stairwell. “When I eat, I wonder if you grew the food. When I see a flower, I wonder if it’s a dahlia. Nothing has changed that I can tell, yet everything feels different. It’s like you’re on the edge of my vision everywhere I go, but when I turn to look you’re never there.”
I take a deep breath, but immediately I need another. I’ve felt the same way for weeks. “Why?” I ask him in spite of the now-familiar flush in my cheeks. “Why can’t I get you out of my head?”
What is this feeling? Why am I drawn to him like a magnet to metal, when I know this can only mean trouble for us both? Management makes no effort to keep the boys and girls in the Workforce Academy apart, but we aren’t even allowed to speak to people from other bureaus. Is this why?
“Because you’re attracted to me.” Trigger’s gaze seems to see deep inside me. “And it’s very much mutual.”
“I don’t understand what that means.” But maybe I do, at least a little bit. My hands feel pulled to his flesh—to his arms, his chest. My gaze feels pulled to his face, where it snags on his mouth again, even in the dark.
“I know. Workforce doesn’t truly fraternize. You girls exist alongside the boys in your union, but it’s like you’re uninterested in each other, and I can’t figure out why. Unless it’s that the boys in your union don’t look very different from the girls.”
“Is it different in Defense? Is your fraternizing more like…this? This attraction?” I want him to say yes, because that would mean that what’s considered a flaw in me isn’t considered a flaw in every girl. That would make me feel a little less damaged. Yet I want him to say no, because I don’t want to think about Trigger 17 feeling this strange and electrifying attraction to some other girl.
“Yes. Every time we leave the city, we’re risking our lives. In order to stay functional and efficient under that kind of pressure, we’re allowed to decompress on a level commensurate with our stress level. That’s true for both our male and female cadets.”
I frown at him in the dark. “I only understood about half of that.” But the parts I understand have deepened the warmth spreading through me.
The only basis I know of for boys and girls being drawn to each other comes from a now-obsolete biological imperative my class learned about in our basic biology unit from year fifteen.
Much like plants growing in the dirt, people used to grow in the wild as well. Children were produced one at a time, with only the occasional set of two or three, and even those rarely matched one another. Fertilization was messy and ridiculously inefficient. The process required a man and a woman, rather than a geneticist and a lab, and conception was never a guarantee, but because that was primitive mankind’s only way to reproduce, men and women were drawn to each other for the purpose of procreation.
The whole thing was crude and uncivilized, yet neither of those adjectives seems to apply to the way I feel with Trigger staring down at me. I feel like my heart is too big for its cavity and my skin is too flushed to be at a normal temperature.
This isn’t supposed to be happening. Mankind has moved beyond the need for such urges and biological reactions. Yet Trigger doesn’t seem surprised or confused.
“I’ll show you.” He takes another step toward me. “May I kiss you?”
“Kiss…?” My question dies on my tongue as his hands land on my shoulders and slide down my arms. He bends toward me and I suck in a surprised breath. Then his lips meet mine, and I lose the ability to think. I can only feel, and I’ve never felt anything like this in my life.
This is not a kiss. A kiss is bestowed upon skinned knees by nannies in the primary dorm. A kiss is bestowed upon cheeks by identicals in celebration of a team victory. A kiss eases the perception of pain or elevates a feeling of success. This is something else entirely.
This kiss ignites the heat simmering low in my stomach like a match dropped in a puddle of fuel.
Trigger sucks gently on my lower lip, and my mouth opens in surprise. He slides one hand into my hair, tilting my head for a better angle, and I feel the gentle graze of his teeth. The tip of his tongue brushes my upper lip, then dips into my mouth, and my world explodes into a vibrancy and intensity I have never imagined possible.
When Trigger steps back, he leaves me gasping for breath. Hungry for more. “That’s a kiss,” he whispers.
Though my sixteen years of life experience argue otherwise, I am suddenly certain that he’s right. That I’ve been tragically misled on the subject. “Show me again.”
He reaches for me, a wicked smile haunting his mouth in the darkness. We are deep in the middle of our second kiss when the door flies open. Harsh daylight drenches our private moment. Terror surges through me.
Belay 35 stands in the doorway. At his back are two identical soldiers from year twenty-two. “Dahlia 16!” my instructor cries as the soldiers push past him.
“No! Wait!” Trigger shouts as they haul him away from me. “This isn’t her fault. I snuck into the shed. I did this.”
I hear a soft zipping sound as they secure his hands at his back with a plastic strip.
“You are both hereby remanded to the custody of Management for violation of the fraternization directive,” one of the soldiers informs us.
My heart races as they turn me around and push me up against the volleyball rack. Several of the balls fall and bounce at my feet. One of the soldiers pulls my hands behind me while the other slips a zip restraint over them. The plastic pins my wrists together and pinches my skin, but I don’t truly understand the meaning of words like fear and humiliation until they haul me out of the shed.
A class of female year-sixteen carpenters watches from the lawn, their soccer game forgotten. They stare at me, shocked, their expressions an exact reflection of the fear my own must show, because we all share the same face.
No, we share much more than that. If something is wrong with me, it’s wrong with them too. They know what my arrest means as well as I do.